She calls me Girl. I call her Mother. I’m talking to you girl. Girl are you listening. What goes on in that head of yours girl. I do not even smile when she says these things. She does not want to know what goes on my head. And I cannot tell her, you are my mother only on paper. Only in name. As Father is only my father on paper.

I am not their child. I am no one’s child. Jim is the only real family I have. We grew up together, and he knows all my thoughts and he sings them to me. We are fire and forest, serpent and tree. I can’t even recall a time before Jim. 

Father-on-paper lives across town, with a slim-hipped blond whose name I forget. “Twenty-something” is what Mother calls her. Abandoned us, she says, for Twenty-something. In truth she is thirty. And Father left Mother for many reasons.

I am not warm, or out-going or friendly. I am not friends with the girls in my school. They seem silly to me. Soap bubbles

(German noun)Vicarious embarrassment, feeling shame for others' actions.

"from Proto-Germanic *framaþiz (“foreign, not one's own”) and German scham, shame"
—wiktionary

A handy little German word for which there's not an English equivalent. I think of it as being opposed to schadenfreude, which is taking pleasure at someone else's misfortune.

It's come up today as

I got the telephone call at approximately 8:15PM.

My father had passed away.

I had just seen him earlier in the day, in his assisted living residence, on hospice care. He had a full time care aide with him, and his facility had their folks coming in to see him frequently - more frequently than they were obliged to, he was (as I was told by more than one of them) popular with the staff.

I had left him around noon. My brother had brought his wife and youngest son over to say